Euromed: Website created for emancipation of Arab women

Initiative by European Council to favour dialogue

(ANSAmed) - STRASBOURG, APRIL 25 - A new website set up by
the European Council's North-South Centre is aiming to create a
platform upon which European and Arab women can swap
experiences.
The Euro-Med Women Network website (www.nswomennetwork.org)
has been put in place by the Italian MP Deborah Bergamini, the
chair of the North-South Centre, and was presented in Strasbourg
today to a selection of authoritative representatives of the
northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, who oversaw
the launch of the website and begun efforts that will allow
suggestions and demands emerging from online discussion to be
implemented.

''The Arab Spring came about thanks to the Internet and this
will also be our meeting place,'' Bergamini said. ''Any woman,
Arab or European, will be able to contact other women, swap
mutual experiences, but also send messages to civil society and
to political authorities''.

''In this way, we want to help Arab women, who have thus far
been deprived of any right to emancipate themselves,'' Bergamini
continued. ''The initiative is one of the projects being carried
out by the European Council to facilitate equality between men
and women in southern Mediterranean countries''.

The parliamentary assembly yesterday approved a report
prepared by Fatiha Sadi, a Belgian socialist MP of Moroccan
descent, which asks countries that have recently set out on a
road towards democracy to introduce reforms ''elevating the
status of women and removing any form of discrimination against
them'', measures without which the Arab Spring would not be
legitimised and, as a result, doomed to failure.

After the debate in the chamber, to boost the message of
equality between men and women, there was an exhibition of
paintings by the Palestinian artist Nadia Shihabi, who is
involve in the struggle for women's rights, and whose father was
an activist in the movement for the liberation of Palestine.
(ANSAmed).